The Last Man On Earth

Shot in Italy on a shoe-string budget and released by American International Pictures, this nihilistic and impressive black-and-white adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1956 novel, I Am Legend has long been a favorite of cultists and genre scholars -- and for good reasons. Although Matheson removed his name from the completed film (writing here as "Logan Swanson" instead), this horror piece from the sixties remains my favorite interpretation of the material. 

The Last Man on Earth opens with stark black-and-white images of urban desolation and emptiness.  Scattered corpses lay strewn across lonely streets and byways, and the placard of a Community Church reads "The End Has Come." 

It is three years post-apocalypse as we pick up the tale of Robert Morgan (Vincent Price), the titular last man on Earth. We learn (in relatively lengthy...) flashback that a plague of vampirism began in Europe, carried "on the wind" and then arrived in the United States, precipitating a national disaster and the declaration of martial law. But that's all the past. Robert, a scientist working at the Mercer Institute of Chemical Research (!) has lost his young daughter and loving wife to the plague and now lives a solitary, pleasure-less existence. We can tell immediately from Robert's posture and demeanor that he is a beaten 
man, one who does not want to make eye contact with the terrifying and gloomy world around him. Yet still he forces himself to adhere to the daily "routine" that keeps him alive in the face of the vampire menace. 

In his own words, Robert lives merely "a heartbeat from Hell," and survives each long night as roaming vampires lay siege to his home, calling out his name and entreating him to come out and fight. The leader of the vampires is a former friend, now a monster. Robert protects his cluttered, disordered house with garlic, defends himself from the vampires with mirrors, and by sun-lit day goes out in methodical search of vampire nests...where he stakes sleeping vampires in the heart. We watch a montage of overlapping, superimposed images of many a death blow, as Robert hammers his rage into the fiendish, monstrous descendants of humanity. 

The early (and most remarkable and affecting...) portions of The Last Man on Earth play out as a grotesque commentary on the modern "rat race," as we follow Price in the "day of the life" of the last man on Earth.  He lives a very regimented life and one can practically see him mentally ticking off his "to-do" list. After the initial views of a ruined, (mostly) unpopulated metropolis, the film targets in on Price's character, his dilemma and his m.o. 

As the film proper starts, the camera glides through a suburban house's bedroom window as Robert sleeps fitfully...and then his alarm clock goes off. He rouses himself and walks past a wall of hand-drawn calendars (years and years of calendars, we see...), and then gets down to grim business. Robert sharpens his stakes, replaces the garlic on the front door of his home, cleans up the corpses sprawled in his front yard and then realizes he needs supplies (gasoline and fresh garlic). Robert sits down and tallies up the stops he'll need to make that day on "the job" before the sun sets - from shopping at an eerily lifeless grocery store to going 
about the ghoulish business of disposing of vampire bodies in a huge, fiery pit. 

These moments in the film expose how deeply human beings cling to the idea of routine, especially in times of stress, to impose a sense of control, order and comfort over our chaotic lives. Robert - a man who states he has no time for "the luxury of anger" - busies himself with the hunting/gathering of daily survival but seems to do so on almost automatic pilot. The film has no huge signature moments during this portion of its running time; it merely charts the almost boring routine of the last man alive. The result is an oddly intimate 
and small film that captures the horror of the apocalypse more successfully than many a special effects extravaganza because we feel connected to the man and his situation.

As The Last Man on Earth continues, the film is practically littered with images and sounds of time passing by, from the tic-tock of clocks on the soundtrack, to images of those calendars dotting his walls or views of alarm clocks. "Another day to start all over again," Robert laments, and the viewer comes to understand that the routine of this miserable existence is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it busies Robert; a curse because it feels never ending and there is no joy - or love - in any of it. 

Basically, this is a one man show, Price's show, and The Last Man on Earth is as much character piece as action film. Action scenes arise because of character, in fact. When Robert succumbs to self-pity and sentimentality by visiting his old church, for instance, he falls asleep and stays out after sundown...meaning he'll have to engage the vampires on their terms.  

In regards to cinematic aesthetics, this film is legend. The Last Man on Earth heralds the future of horror cinema (brutal, gritty and realistic, sans iconic monsters like Dracula and the Wolf Man...) and though produced by an American, appears ripped from the Italian school of neo-realism, post-World War II. The film is lensed in bracing, grainy black-and-white, and like the neo-realist films of the 1940s and 1950s, is shot mostly outdoors, on the streets (an easily available location). 

Thematically, the Price film actually shares something in common with the neo-realist movement as well. The cinema of that period in Italy's history portrayed post-war economic and social changes in a mostly negative manner (I'm thinking The Bicycle Thief here...), and the very subject of this film, (life in a post-apocalyptic world as a new society arises) hits some of the same philosophies, only in genre-specific terms. Though today we hardly blanch at such things, this film includes the startling images of corpses being burned in a pit by the U.S. Army (including Robert's daughter) and the unlikely sight of a vampire dog staked through the heart (though covered by a blanket). It is blunt and graphic, but not overdone. It all feels alarmingly really and - unlike most Hollywood cinema - not exaggerated for effect. This film is cheap, no doubt, but gloriously cheap. It makes the best out of a limited set of resources, focusing on the nature of one man (Robert), rather than hordes of rampaging monsters.  

True to the spirit of its Matheson source material if not all the details, The Last Man on Earth ultimately concerns the changing-of-the-guard, of one society in rapid descent as another ascends. About the old guard falling while the new guard rises. Throughout the film, the vampire plague is regarded not merely as a disease, but something more. It is suggested, actually that the plague is "a strange evolutionary process," a natural development of the human animal.  I love The Last Man on Earth because it is basic and blunt. It is so effectively shot and mounted that it features a timeless quality which grants it tremendous currency today. (John Kenneth Muir)